Eurydice, from Hades

by Faye George

Those who are acquainted with the goddess

Know how niggardly she bestows her gifts,

Yet Aphrodite seemed to favor us.

Under her white wing we lived our idyll

Sweetly ignorant of any harm beyond

That safe horizon — when Hades' shadow

Spun a serpent in the grass as I ran

From Aristaeus, who smelled of lust;

What he had in mind was more than friendship.

As if I could love any man but Orpheus.

Had Orpheus been even ten years dead

My skin would sing the lyric of his touch.

The music love makes sacred to the heart

Plays on, tenderly remembering when . . .

He would sit at my foot, I'd stroke his head

As the long skein of a tale unwound

And clung half dreamed to imagination,

Heroic deeds with Jason, kleos won

In lands to which the Argo turned her prow.

Sailing into legend as one of them,

His weapon of choice the lyre he cradled

In the crook of his arm — and a voice

That could melt the fangs of beasts to docile drool

And please the trees and stones to follow him.

I followed him, with delicious abandon,

Love's green fool swept along like a wild

Blown leaf in a storm, to this closed realm.

He was — irresistible. I have learned

The cruel weather of the heart is the hardest

Condition of hell. Shall I blame innocence,

That dove whose lofted flight distracts the eye

Which should attend the serpent at the foot?

For this is when the Spinning Ones take tribute.

Orpheus thought he had the Fates in harness,

In this respect he was all innocence.

Gifted, handsome, accustomed to success,

He could charm the gods and alter nature,

Wrest life from death for a second chance, but

He never learned some rules cannot be bent.

And he never learned patience.